Baroness Scotland of Asthal: My Lords, we do not believe that that is right. The noble and learned Lord will know that conditional cautions are offered to those who agree and accept responsibility. It will always be open to the person if they did not wish to accept the conditional caution to go through the ordinary court procedure—the full panoply—and have their matter dealt with another way. The whole purpose of expanding the nature of conditional cautions is to allow the minor offences to be dealt with quickly, efficiently and speedily, particularly if the offender is accepting responsibility in a way that will ensure that there is a sanction. The community is therefore paid back in a way that is appropriate without necessarily making that person into a criminal in such a way that they cannot move on later. It is a quick, easy and effective way of recognising poor behaviour and intervening in a sensible manner.
	We hope that we will have more opportunity to talk about the levels—when they should apply, how they should apply, what would be the conditions, what would be the format and matters of that sort. I am sure that when we come to debate this more fully in Committee, those will be the sorts of issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay—if I know anything about her—will want to press me on. We will have to look very carefully at how this fits in with sentencing and what will be appropriate.
	We know that there was a lot of discussion in the other place in relation to this issue and I anticipate that your Lordships will wish to press us further on it to make sure that the balance is right. I see the nods coming from around the House and anticipate the sorts of discussions and debates that we will have about it. I also hear affirmation coming from the Liberal Democrat Benches and elsewhere.
	Part 3 is the area to which we now turn our minds in relation to crime and anti-social behaviour. This part talks about the ways in which we intend to make our communities safer. It is not only a matter for the police. It requires other key agencies—local authorities, police and fire and rescue authorities and primary care trusts—to work with the police in partnership. To this end, we established the crime and disorder reduction partnerships in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. The CDRPs have had some success—some of us would say a considerable success—and they have the potential to achieve even more.
	To that end, Part 3 of the Bill makes a number of amendments to the 1998 Act, enabling crime and disorder reduction partnerships to become the most effective vehicle possible for partnership working in the reduction of crime and anti-social behaviour. The Bill will improve delivery by reducing unnecessary bureaucracy and enabling better flows of information between partners; introduce national standards to ensure that the best working practices are adopted by all partnerships nationwide; and improve the accountability arrangements for partnerships by providing for scrutiny of community safety by local authority overview and scrutiny committees.
	The overview and scrutiny committees will also have a key role in the new community call for action provided for in Clause 17. The community call for action will give local people a means to trigger action on a community safety issue where they are dissatisfied with the response by the police or local authority. Ward councillors will play a central role acting as an advocate for local residents and seeking to resolve issues through an informal dialogue with the neighbourhood policing team or local authority, as appropriate.
	As the Prime Minister set out in the Respect Action Plan, parents are also key partners in building safer communities. In fact, effective parenting is one of the key drivers in preventing children from engaging in anti-social behaviour. It is vital that the police are supported at the neighbourhood level by parents in creating a strong society based on mutual respect. To that end, the Bill will widen the range of agencies that can enter into parenting contracts and apply for parenting orders to secure their engagement. Parenting orders are already highly successful where they are used by local authorities to combat truancy. Youth offending teams successfully applied for some 1,273 orders in 2004–05 alone. The breach rate is low and most parents subject to an order grow to value the support that they receive; indeed, many wish that they had received such support earlier.
	Part 4 of the Bill is relevant to the whole of the justice system. It creates the new justice, community safety and custody inspectorate, which will replace the five existing inspectorates covering the police, probation, prisons, court administration and the Crown Prosecution Service. The inspectorate will create a modern, unified, strongly led and forward-looking inspection regime which will be every bit as independent as the existing inspectorates. It will support front-line staff by minimising unnecessary duplication of inspection and the additional work that that entails. With its overview of the justice system, the inspectorate will provide a capacity to challenge whether the police, courts, Crown Prosecution Service and National Offender Management Service are giving the public the best possible service.
	There is an argument that because of the unique position of HM Inspectorate of Prisons, it should be maintained as a separate inspectorate. I agree that the Chief Inspector of Prisons has a unique role in ensuring that persons held in custody on behalf of society as a whole are kept in decent conditions and that their human rights are respected. That is why the new inspectorate will have a special duty to continue that role and why we will not abolish the Chief Inspector of Prisons until we are sure that the new chief inspector is ready to fill the role satisfactorily.
	The creation of the National Offender Management Service, uniting the Prison Service and the National Probation Service to provide end-to-end management of offenders, demands a unified inspection regime. An inspection regime that looks only at what happens to an individual when in prison, and relies on another inspectorate to tell it what happens before and after, cannot report credibly on the whole process of offender management from start to finish. A single chief inspector for the justice system will be a more powerful public voice, able to say what is wrong with the system as a whole and what needs to be done to put it right, especially at the joins where the activities of different agencies interface.
	Finally, Part 5 deals with one of the growing new threats that can be tackled only through extensive international co-operation; namely, the continued threat posed by computer hacking and denial-of-service attacks. To that end, the Bill makes provision to criminalise all means of interfering with a computer system, increases the penalties for hacking offences and criminalises the supply of so-called "hacking tools".
	This Part of the Bill also provides a suitable opportunity to review the Extradition Act 2003, which has now been in force for more than two years. The Act was a complete overhaul of extradition law, some of which dated back to the 19th century. It also implemented the European arrest warrant, which governs extradition between EU states on the principle of mutual recognition.
	Unsurprisingly, after such a major reform of complex law, some minor lacunae and operating difficulties have emerged in the first years of operation. The amendments in the Bill are to correct these lacunae, to clarify areas of doubt and to ensure that the United Kingdom is not in breach of international agreements. They are therefore essentially technical amendments to the 2003 Act which do not alter the existing framework governing our extradition arrangements with either Europe or the wider world.
	As a package, the Bill makes a vital contribution towards the realisation of our goal of safer communities and I have no hesitation in commending it to the House.
	Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Baroness Scotland of Asthal.)

Baroness Anelay of St Johns: My Lords, another day, another Home Office Bill. The Violent Crime Reduction Bill has not even reached Report yet. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, who has been dealing with it, tells us to give it time. It sounds as though it will have until October.
	I am told by the Library that this is the 52nd Home Office Bill since the Government came to power in 1997. The noble Baroness gave a careful introduction. As always, she gives the House a very fair reflection of the Government's view on these matters. A few of the Bill's proposals will make some modest improvements, and noble Lords on the Conservative Benches will certainly support those, for example, the new powers to tackle child pornography, the increased sentences for computer hacking and the extension of provisions about parenting contracts. The latter will be dealt with from the Conservative Benches by my noble friend Lord Bridgeman. We felt that another place did not have time to give sufficient consideration to those matters.
	However, we have serious concerns about four issues in particular: police mergers; the increase in the Home Secretary's powers to interfere in operational policing; the merging of the Inspectorate of Prisons with other criminal justice inspectorates; and our extradition arrangements with the United States.
	The Bill maintains an unfortunate trend of increasing government direction of the police. It aims to prepare police authorities for the Government's proposed regional police forces. It does not itself propose police amalgamations; the Government have said that they will go ahead with those using secondary legislation under the Police Act 1996. We shall table amendments that will put the debate about the Home Secretary's proposal for merging police forces at the very heart of our consideration of Part 1 of the Bill.
	I believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, said in her opening remarks that it was right for the Home Secretary—after all, he has been in post for only a couple of weeks or so—to take a little time to consider the details. I hope that the new Home Secretary will delay laying any statutory instruments until full consideration has been given to these matters during the passage of the Bill. In her reply, I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to give an undertaking to that effect.
	In the 1960s, when police force amalgamations were last considered, a Royal Commission was established which took two years to report. Legislation was introduced a year later. It was recognised that the structure of police forces is a fundamental issue on which the public, the forces themselves and their authorities need to be properly consulted. Our worry is that the way in which the Government are proceeding could not be more different. The previous Home Secretary's proposals to amalgamate forces were announced last September, and gave forces just four months in which to respond. In the words of the Labour chairman of the Association of Police Authorities, he attempted to "bully and bribe" authorities to agree to his proposals and to meet the deadline, a tactic that backfired spectacularly when not one authority submitted.
	In February, the Home Secretary again gave police authorities an ultimatum, this time to submit proposals for voluntary mergers within just three weeks. Again, almost all the authorities concerned refused, but the Home Secretary announced that he would proceed with compulsory amalgamations regardless. At that stage, he rejected the alternative proposals put forward by the police. The police were not against modernisation and they were not against improvements; for example, Bob Quick, who is the chief constable in my own area of Surrey, has argued that police forces could improve their efficiency by sharing services. I agree with him. That would be a better way forward.
	The report of Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary, Denis O'Connor, on which the Government are relying, said:
	"The constitutional implications . . . are significant".
	We are now being asked to agree that similar order-making powers be given to the Home Secretary through this Bill to allow him to alter the structure and functions of police authorities. It is hardly surprising that the chairman of the Association of Police Authorities, Mr Bob Jones, has expressed alarm at the provisions. He said:
	"The Home Secretary is now proposing to give himself power to change the role and membership of local authorities . . . and the bodies which represent them. Only Parliament, not the Home Secretary, should be able to do this".
	Earlier today, the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, said that the Government value the tripartite relationship and do not seek to unbalance it. We are concerned that the measures in the Bill will do just that, and we shall have to examine them extremely carefully. The Government have claimed that they have rejected the idea of a national police force, but the reorganisation is moving us steadily towards that model. Twelve police chiefs, rather than 43, would, effectively, answer to the Home Secretary and not to their local communities.
	The new national policing improvement agency, introduced by Clause 1, will not answer to police forces or to authorities; indeed, the Government have flatly rejected a proposal from police authorities that they should even part-fund the agency. We shall table amendments to address that defect.
	The Government claim that proposals in the Bill to align basic command unit and crime and disorder reduction partnership boundaries will strengthen local accountability. But the number of BCUs has reduced from around 400, when the Government came into power, to 225 today. The Government are pressing partnerships, which are currently based on district council areas, to merge. They cannot credibly claim that police accountability will be achieved through local government scrutiny when the partnerships are being altered to make them more remote from the people. The real decisions will be taken, not in the partnerships, but in Whitehall and by chief officers in regional headquarters. Inevitably, they will be less answerable to local people.
	I turn now to the Government's proposals to subsume the Inspectorate of Prisons into the new, combined inspectorate for justice, community safety and custody. We are persuaded that this will compromise the independence of the Inspectorate of Prisons and should not go ahead. I look forward to hearing the detail of the arguments on this matter from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and from my noble friend Lord Hurd. They are experts in these matters so I certainly do not intend to take up the House's time with my less expert comments.
	The Bill's technical amendments to the Extradition Act 2003 appear to be acceptable, although of course we will want to submit them to scrutiny. I was interested in how they were introduced by the Minister, who said that after two years in operation minor lacunae had come to light in the Extradition Act.
	We remain deeply concerned about another aspect of our extradition arrangements: the consequences of the United Kingdom/US extradition treaty. It has not been ratified by Congress. Its one-sided operation is a serious cause for concern. The treaty was sold as being necessary to deal with terrorism and serious crime; but it is being used to require the extradition of offenders who have a minimal connection with the US.
	My noble friend Lord Kingsland will lead for us on all debates on extradition matters. He will table amendments to restrict extradition to the US under the Extradition Act to terrorism cases, until such time as full reciprocity is granted by the US, and to put in place safeguards to ensure that, in future, extradition will not happen if the alleged crime could be tried here under domestic jurisdictions and there is no clear causal link with the US.
	Although our main focus, of course, will be on police reorganisation, the inspectorates and extradition, we will, as always, scrutinise carefully all measures in the Bill. For example, a number of the Bill's proposals rely on the extension of police summary power and summary justice.
	Clause 15 allows conditional cautions to include punitive conditions. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, made an important intervention earlier. Schedule 4 will allow arresting officers to set bail conditions. However, those proposals raise a number of serious issues. First, under the new bail conditions, the police alone will be able to make significant restrictions on someone's liberty, such as by tagging and with curfews, before they have even decided that there is enough evidence to bring a criminal prosecution. The power to impose punitive conditions in cautions effectively will allow the police to act as investigator, prosecutor and judge. We will need to consider whether that is the right way forward. The Minister was absolutely right to realise that that would arouse concern. I do not wish to disappoint her and I can assure her that I used last week's wonderful Recess to work on some amendments with our marvellous researcher, Caroline Chamberlain. They are ready to be tabled tomorrow morning for the noble Baroness's delectation.
	The closest that the Bill gets to police modernisation is in Clause 4, which would allow standardisation of the powers of community support officers. The balance of the exact powers involved will need discussion in Committee, but they seem to be promising proposals.
	The fight against terrorism will remain at the top of the police agenda, so we welcome the power in Clause 12 to extend police search powers in airports. For the same reason, we will be open-minded about the power in that clause to gather in bulk passenger information for ship and aircraft journeys in the UK. We will want to be persuaded that that is necessary and that it will contain adequate safeguards.
	In his Dimbleby lecture last year, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner called for a national debate on policing, and stated:
	"It is time to decide what kind of police service we want".
	He was right. This is the right time to have such a debate. Important issues are at stake: the independence of police forces, how they should be accountable and how they should be organised both to accommodate the demand for neighbourhood policing and to meet the renewed threat of domestic terrorism. The Bill is not much of an answer to those questions. It reflects the Government's continuing preoccupation with the incessant reorganisation of, and intervention in, public services.
	We all want to see police forces that provide value for money, instil public confidence and are effective in the fight against crime. So we will work constructively to achieve those aims throughout our scrutiny of this Bill.

Lord Dholakia: My Lords, the Police and Justice Bill raises some fundamental questions. I detect no common thread between different parts of it. However, that is to be expected, since the Home Office sees legislation as the answer to all society's ills; as the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, rightly pointed out, there have been 52 Home Office Bills in less than 10 years. The only comparison that I can draw is that there have been as many Home Secretaries since 1996 as policing Bills introduced by this Government. We had the Police Act 1996, which was followed by the 1997, 2002 and 2005 Acts. In the mean time, we have seen Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Charles Clarke come and go, and now we have John Reid in charge.
	At first glance I am not sure whether anywhere near sufficient attention has been given to the fact that this is the latest of almost yearly legislative proposals affecting the organisation and function of law-enforcement agencies and, in particular, policing. There must come a time when we need to ask this simple question: does the periodic reorganisation of such agencies indicate that the Government simply cannot make up their mind about what policing is all about? No business would even consider carrying out structural and functional reorganisation of fundamental institutions with the frequency that we have seen in recent times.
	I do not doubt that the Bill is not as complete as it should be, because it fails to address the real issues. How do we identify the requirements of public safety and security in this country? We need to know which law enforcement functions have to be performed. How best can those functions be provided, given the constraint of resources? Is the Bill really adequate to determine what reorganisational arrangements should be implemented in order to resolve the fundamental issues of what should be done and how it should be done? In the policing debate on 10 May I said that policing is just one aspect of that discussion—an important aspect—but instead of discussing it we seem to focus more on the reorganisation of police forces.
	Like the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, I welcome the invitation from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, to open up the debate following his Dimbleby lecture. I shall certainly participate in those discussions. We need to answer fundamental questions about policing, which were last dealt with by the Royal Commission some 40 years ago. Would it not be wise to deliberate a little longer before proceeding with the changes envisaged in the Bill? A debate of that nature should also take into account the unremitting periodic assault on some of our freedoms. Of course, in a changing situation we cannot rule out the need to respond to the threat of terrorism and international organised crime. The impact of legislation that compromises our civil liberties is a delicate issue and we should exercise care to ensure that no measure taken should fundamentally alter the balance that we have enjoyed for centuries. Policing is about public consent and independence.
	I need to be convinced that the Bill is not yet another example of the move towards central control over policing. If that is the case, we are altering the balance of the situation, under which the police service was run on behalf of communities and we allowed the chief constable to have independence and autonomy over operational issues. The Secretary of State was the third element of that tripartite arrangement.
	I have little doubt that the proposals in the Bill will give the Home Office increased control over policing and that, with the reinforcement of national policy-setting and performance-review powers, it will provide de facto control at all levels. Local control is being eroded to the point at which it will mean little or nothing.
	The last time we came nearest to exercising central control over policing was during the miners' strike, when the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, was Prime Minister. Despite all the intervening years, miners still feel bitter and their relationship with the police force has remained strained.
	Policing is possible only with the consent of communities. There is no way in which the police can maintain public safety unless the public consent to it. We remove that consent at our peril. We have opposed police mergers on the basis that they appear to be about saving money rather than improving performance and about centralisation rather than accountability. We must of course recognise the need for structural reforms; we have not accepted that having larger forces is the most effective way to overcome the problems identified by HMIC.
	Furthermore, amalgamation would reduce police accountability and responsiveness by distancing force headquarters from the communities themselves by sacrificing co-terminosity with local authority boundaries. Will the Minister confirm that the estimated £500 million to £600 million cost of amalgamation will not come at the expense of the Government's neighbourhood policing strategy?
	The merger proposal was not mentioned during the previous general election, nor did it form part of the Labour manifesto. Legal challenges are still pending and the consultation process has been grossly inadequate. That said, I accept that there needs to be a complete reconsideration of a properly developed service for the future. That will take time, and real and pressing commitments must be addressed. There is a danger that failure to consider future requirements will result in a continual piecemeal slide towards greater central control and structural change, without providing any improvement. It would be unfortunate to lose sight of some positive measures in Part 1, as identified by the Minister. Of course we support a number of the Bill's provisions, such as the incorporation of the Central Police Training and Development Authority and the Police Information and Technology Organisation into a National Policing Improvement Agency, which is a logical and sensible step forward.
	Computer hacking is a serious problem and the extent to which the Government are collecting personal information is frightening. The security of such data is paramount, and such information must be secure. Equally, we welcome the sternest measures that we can take to tackle the illegal possession of indecent photographs of children. My noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Linklater will have more to say about the provisions affecting children. Equally welcome is the harmonisation and extension of the powers of community support officers, provided that we are all assured that training will be an essential requirement before such powers are exercised.
	I also take pleasure, and credit if I may, for the campaign which I led to ensure that complaints and misconduct in the immigration and asylum system were properly investigated under powers invested in the Independent Police Complaints Commission. If only the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, had accepted my advice when I moved a similar amendment a few years ago to the immigration and asylum legislation, instead of rejecting the suggestion outright. I am glad that at last he has seen the wisdom of my case.
	I ought to declare a further interest. At one time, I was a member of the Police Complaints Authority. I am also acquainted with the work of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The proposal will not only create a better system but improve public confidence in the system. My noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond will have more to say about police reforms.
	I now turn to Part 4. The Government's intention about the inspection arrangements is not in doubt. In previous debates and questions the Minister has assured us that the Government want the current approach, methodology and the ambit of the inspection of our penal institutions to be retained. I am afraid that the Government are in a very tight spot. They cannot do otherwise because they have to meet the United Kingdom's international obligations regarding protection of human rights of prisoners.
	Successive chief inspectors, such as the late Judge Stephen Tumin, Sir David Ramsbotham—now the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham—and Anne Owers, have retained their independence in setting detailed criteria for inspectors, conducting unannounced inspections, and criticising unacceptable policy and practices. I have always believed that the independence of inspectors should never be sacrificed, however critical their reports. HMIs stand between unchecked oppressive policies and the civilised values that must form part of the basis of our penal policies. The Government should have no worries because almost 96 per cent of HMI recommendations are accepted by the institutions and the successful implementation is as high as 75 per cent.
	Of course no Home Secretary can take comfort when frequent inspection reports reflect what is wrong with our penal institutions. But we must not forget that the standards we set are the envy of the civilised world. I am aware that the Correctional Service of Canada invited out HMI to inspect two women's prisons using criteria and methods deployed here. I am also aware that Anne Owers gave evidence in the US to a hearing of the Vera commission on prisoner abuse. Our prison inspectorate is considered to be the leading international example. We are a source of encouragement to many nations across the world. If that is the fitting endorsement of our HMI, why is it necessary to change such a successful body?
	We will be told that the Government wish to preserve this within the proposed new inspectorate, but all of us who have worked towards prison reform are convinced that over time we will dilute the effectiveness and independence we have cherished so long.
	I am not convinced that a single inspectorate for justice, community safety and custody under a single chief inspector can perform two duties, bearing in mind that there are two entirely separate functions requiring different methods. I do not dispute the need for joined-up work with other inspectorates. That already happens. There is a close working relationship with the two education inspectorates, and with the Healthcare Commission under a memorandum of understanding, and a close link with the probation inspectorate.
	Clause 25 gives Ministers powers of direction over the chief inspectors as well as the ability to direct that inspections are carried out and advice given. But there is a draconian requirement that, in exercising any of his functions, the chief inspector shall have regard to such aspects of government policy as the responsible ministers may direct. I am afraid that that is wholly unacceptable.
	Taken to its extreme, this provision could also be invoked to prevent a chief inspector criticising aspects of government policy. It does not fit well with some Home Secretaries' pronouncements that prisons work. We shall of course advance further arguments during Committee and Report. I hope that there is a change of heart in the Home Office on this contentious provision.
	Let me also explain my concern about the section on extradition. I fully endorse the position set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. I must question the Government's track record, given that they have failed to deal with the unfair, unequal and painfully embarrassing nature of our extradition arrangements with the United States. We were told by the Prime Minister that the only purpose of this arrangement was to deal with terrorism. The Government now see that there is evidence that such powers are used to deal with fraud offences as well. I do not underestimate the difficulties faced by the new Home Secretary. Public expectations about crime and punishment are high and the Home Secretary's ability to deliver is limited—events of the past few weeks have clearly demonstrated that.
	There are some useful measures in the Bill which we support but, in return, we ask the Minister to exercise great care that the Home Office does not blur the relationship between criminal justice agencies, the public and the legislators.

Lord Harris of Haringey: My Lords, I should begin by declaring an interest as a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority and of the executive of the Association of Police Authorities. I also chair the All-Party Group on Police, which is supported by the Association of Police Authorities, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Police Federation.
	It is in the nature of Second Reading debates that one dwells on the issues with which one disagrees in the Bill. I want to start by making a more general point: most of the Bill is about bringing forward elements of police reform. Although there is the appearance of a series of disparate parts, the Bill is intended to achieve a convincing whole to deliver better-quality policing that is better fit for the future.
	Having said that, I want to focus on a number of problem areas. The concept of the National Policing Improvement Agency is extremely good; it could be a very powerful mechanism to achieve police reform. My noble friend, in introducing the Bill very thoroughly earlier this afternoon, talked about that agency creating a culture of self-improvement and enabling the police service to meet the challenges of the future, ensuring, in effect, that the police service is fit for purpose in future. Those are important and valuable objectives. I therefore welcome the creation of the National Policing Improvement Agency.
	However, I wonder—I want to hear from my noble friend in her reply—whether sufficient has been done to rationalise the existing structure. We will have a National Policing Improvement Agency, but we will continue to have Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary—albeit one that is subsumed into the new inspectorate. We will also continue to have the Police Standards Unit, which resides in the Home Office. If we are to take these steps towards rationalisation, I wonder whether we should not bring more of these functions together to ensure that all the levers are available for an agency that was designed to improve policing practice.
	The proposed arrangements for the ownership of the new agency are also deficient. If the principle of the tripartite governance of policing—I note the Minister's warmish words in support of it—is to be maintained and applied to the agency, the agency must be unequivocally owned and supported both by the police service and chief constables and by police authorities. It is not clear to me whether the provisions in the Bill are sufficient to ensure that that will happen. Yes, one person broadly representative of police authorities will sit on the board of this new agency, but does that really amount to a proper role in the governance of police authorities?
	I shall say a little about the principles that should underpin any further reform of our policing structure. I believe that all your Lordships will value the principle of policing by consent—the principle that the police service, which is a civilian service and part of the civil arm of the state, is there by the consent of the communities that it serves. That very important principle underlies all UK policing. The tripartite principle of governance has evolved over a long time to achieve that policing by consent; indeed, I have already referred to that. The idea is that the chief officer of police is operationally responsible for the way in which policing is delivered in a particular area, but that he or she is accountable locally to a police authority, which has a substantial democratic element and is there to ensure that the service meets the needs of local communities and that the chief police officer is aware of the requirements and expectations of those communities. On the other hand, the Home Office is there to ensure that national priorities are being met. Keeping all those elements in balance is a very important principle. I notice that the Minister, when introducing the Bill, talked about the value that she and ministerial colleagues placed on these principles. She has talked about that proper balance not being fundamentally altered by the content of the Bill.
	In the next few minutes, I shall analyse the role of the Home Office and the police authorities in maintaining the tripartite principle after the Bill passes into law, if it passes in this form. First, I shall say a few words about the Home Office's intervention powers. I respectfully say to the Minister that the Bill extends the Home Office's powers of intervention. The Home Secretary will, in future, be able to intervene without reference to the police authority, and will merely have to be satisfied that there is a problem with a particular service. I understand the frustrations of successive Home Secretaries when they are clear that there is a problem. There may be a virtually universal view around the country that there is a problem with policing in a particular area, but we should be very wary of throwing away a proper process that takes account of that tripartite structure and recognises the importance of the local accountability arm.
	The Minister says that the reason for the changes is to enable the Home Secretary to take account of sources of information other than those from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary. I have no problem with that, but there must be other ways of achieving it without dismantling that basic principle. I think that the Bill should require that, in intervening, the Home Secretary must involve the police authority for the area concerned and listen to the best professional advice currently available through Her Majesty's inspectorate.
	Then there is the proposal that basic command units should have statutory status. I have no particular problem with this as a principle but wonder what the intention is. Giving them statutory status will make it easier for a future—or even the present—Chancellor of the Exchequer to announce, in the moments of largesse that we are used to in Budget speeches, that a specific sum of money is being passed to individual basic command units for a particular purpose. I am all for BCUs getting more resources—certainly those with which I am involved in the London area. I just wonder where it leads us on tripartite governance.
	The Association of Chief Police Officers sees the proposal, in an evocative phrase, as "hollowing out" the direction and control of chief constables. The chief constable or chief police officer is responsible for the operational delivery of the entire force. The basic command units are an essential, integral and key part of the running of the police service. Yet if some commanders of BCUs have a specific chunk of money for a specific purpose for which they are personally accountable as statutory bodies, then that will alter their relationship with the chief constables and their overall responsibility for the delivery of services. That is an important issue, and I would welcome clarification on it from my noble friend.
	If there is to be some change in the status of the basic command units—perhaps in recognition of the important role that they and their commanders play in local life in relation to CDRPs and so on—it would be helpful to have a requirement that, in appointing BCU commanders, the chief constable must have regard to the views of the police authority or local authority, or that the police authority should be involved in the appointment process. That is certainly something that we worked towards achieving in my Metropolitan Police area while I was chair. I am not sure that we quite got there, but that involvement is an essential part of delivery at local level.
	My most significant concern is the way in which the Bill takes from the responsibility of primary legislation a whole series of issues about how police authorities operate, and puts them into secondary legislation. I am conscious that this Home Secretary, like his immediate predecessors—there have been several—is a benign, even cuddly individual. We should have no doubt that this Home Secretary has no malign intent for how police authorities operate. Why then, if we have such a benign intent, is the proposal to move so much into secondary legislation?
	I strongly support paragraph 9(2) of Schedule 2, which creates a general duty for police authorities to hold the chief officer of police accountable to the public. I am concerned by the rest of paragraphs 9 and 10, which effectively say that the Secretary of State shall determine the other police authority functions by secondary legislation. A number of key duties should explicitly be in primary legislation. The first is the duty to ensure that communities are consulted in setting policing priorities. That involvement of communities must be a central part of governance. Secondly, police authorities should have the power to set the strategic direction and objectives of the force, within that national framework. Thirdly, there should be a duty to promote diversity and good community relations, something that now applies to other parts of local government; that should be explicit for police authorities, too. Fourthly, there should be a duty to provide information, and similarly a duty to monitor the performance of the force for its area, as well as a duty to ensure that the force co-operates with other forces and other partners where appropriate. Those duties should, I believe, form a part of primary legislation and I do not understand the rationale of the Government in trying to move them out of primary and into secondary legislation.
	Then there are the provisions covering best value. I differ from the right reverend Prelate in that I believe that the duty to promote best value was an important one for police authorities. I am concerned that the Bill removes the powers and levers available to police authorities in delivering best value. As the right reverend Prelate said, we all endorse the importance of best value, but to remove the levers currently available to police authorities to ensure that it is delivered would be unfortunate.
	The membership of police authorities is also to be taken out of primary legislation and put into secondary legislation. If the Bill is passed, questions such as how many members should make up a police authority, what is the process of appointment, what qualifications are required, what issues would lead to the disqualification of police authority members and what is their tenure will all be dealt with in secondary legislation. Similarly, the appointment of the chairs and vice-chairs of police authorities would be left to secondary legislation. We are assured, although I would be grateful to hear it again, that there is no intention to move from the present position whereby police authority chairs and vice-chairs are elected by other members of the police authority. If that is so, why put this into secondary legislation rather than making it explicit in the Bill?
	In my view, there is a great deal of confusion within the Home Office on the question of the number of members on a police authority. The Bill sets out a change in the definition of a "relevant council". Previous Home Office Ministers have said that there is to be one representative from each top-tier local authority on individual police authorities. The implication here is that the ability of people to give a strategic overview and to deliver political balance at the local level is to be sacrificed in favour of the principle of local representation. While I am all for local representation, I wonder whether other provisions such as the enhanced statutory role of crime and disorder reduction partnerships provide that already. A lot is being thrown away with this principle. Further thinking by the Home Office on the question of membership is important.
	I have a final point. This piece of legislation is not about the current arguments taking place on police service reorganisation, but I am concerned that our debates will be coloured entirely by that issue. There are all sorts of arguments about whether police service reorganisation is a good or a bad thing, but the provisions of this Bill are in a sense irrelevant to that. Nevertheless, the changes being proposed here would have very long-term implications for the tripartite relationship between the chief officer of police, the local police authority and the Home Office. I believe that that relationship is essential in underpinning public consent to policing, which in turn is a fundamental tenet of British policing.

Lord Hurd of Westwell: My Lords, it is always easy to listen to the Minister because she is extraordinarily beguiling in the way she sets about her business, but I do not think that I would be the only one to remark on a contrast. If one were to form a point of view of the Home Office based solely on the speeches made by the noble Baroness over the years and again today, one would envisage a department progressing from Bill to Bill, all of them successful and bringing improvements to our society, learning wisely from experience and occasionally filling in what the noble Baroness has called minor lacunae, but leading us slowly and surely towards the desired litter-free paradise of progress and good behaviour. There is therefore a contrast between what we hear from the noble Baroness and what we read everywhere else about the department of which she is a part, not least—and, indeed, most forcefully—from the remarks of her own new chief in the other place.
	There is a serious problem here. While I do not know if I would carry with me my noble friend Lord Waddington, who is to speak shortly, my impression when thinking of the Home Office from years ago is that it is a great department of state which is cumbersome, not particularly communicative, but immensely conscientious and anxious to get things right. I have the impression that those good qualities are now overburdened by change: not only changes in society brought about by drugs, asylum, immigration—one could go on with the list—but change produced by the ceaseless juggling of laws, regulations and procedures, so characteristic of the Home Office sectors of this Government. I simply do not believe that the Home Office will recover its poise and efficacy while pressure from society—and from Ministers in response to changes in society—remains so strong.
	I have a vision that I conjure up every now and then of what this means. It is late afternoon, outside a prison, and the van is coming in from the courts. You do not know how many prisoners you will receive. The van sometimes has to go from one prison to another to find space. Within a few hours there is a tension between all the rules, laws, regulations and procedures that have be fulfilled, and a mass of reluctant, sometimes desperate, human beings who have to be admitted to prison. So long as the pressure of numbers is of that kind, the tensions will be such that whatever legislation we pass on these matters will not be fully effective. When it comes to not being able to count numbers here and there, one has to conjure up the vision of this kind of tense afternoon. That is only in the prison sector, but it applies elsewhere. There is not now time or space for whatever improvements we vote for to be carried through to success.
	This leads me to the Inspectorate of Prisons. I sympathise with what the Government are trying to do, with their desire for simplicity and good order. What the noble Baroness described to us was a sort of motorway, running smoothly from the commission of the crime, through the courts, to imprisonment, release and what happens after release. But when you are planning a motorway, you need to consider not only the route, but what you may demolish along the way. Many of us fear that the prisons inspectorate may be demolished or greatly weakened when this road is built. It is different in nature from other inspectorates. It is concerned with the well-being of individuals who have been deprived of their liberty because of the crimes they have committed. This is a public service not well served by the media, or indeed in either House of Parliament. It is surrounded by a swirl of prejudice and the idea that because these are bad people it does not matter particularly what happens to them once they are imprisoned. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich told us, that approach is the reverse of civilisation.
	The prisons inspectorate stands now as a fortress of good sense in this swirl of prejudice and ignorance. I have known reasonably well the last three chief inspectors. They have been very different in style, vocabulary and method, and they have all been effective: Judge Tumim, whom I appointed in my time; the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who we are delighted is a Member of this House; and the present chief inspector, Anne Owers. The inspectorate, as the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, pointed out, is known and admired in this country among all those who study the subject. It is also copied all over the world. It has certain characteristics, established not so much by law as by how these three individuals have operated. It is not clear to me that these characteristics will be preserved in the Bill. It is even less clear because of the ludicrously inadequate discussion of these matters which took place in the other place.
	The four crucial characteristics are: that there should be an Inspectorate of Prisons with an independent head, not someone derived from the Prison Service or the Home Office; that it should have the ability to operate as it, itself, decides is necessary, which will include, for example, unannounced visits; that its chief should have direct access to the Home Secretary; and that he or she should be able to report independently and to publish when and what he or she wishes. These sound simple things but they have been secured not without difficulty and not without tensions with the bureaucracy over these past years. Nothing that the Minister has said today, that I have seen or that has been said in another place persuades me that these characteristics—and no doubt there are others—will be preserved. I appeal to the Minister to think again and to cause the Home Secretary and the Government to think again.
	At one level, on the sheer merit of the argument, this important matter should not be messed about with in the name of principles which may have a good general application but would do damage here, but mainly because the noble Baroness must realise that the cards are stacked against her. This is piling up and I do not think a simple repetition of the stand taken in the other place, and taken briefly by her today, will do. When my noble friend comes to table amendments, will the Minister please look at them carefully, alter the wording if that is necessary, and enable us to say that the strength and independence of the prisons inspectorate has been preserved.
	Perhaps I may add a word on extradition, an issue dealt with by my noble friend Lady Anelay. I am delighted that the ingenuity of our Front Bench gives us an opportunity to discuss—and, I hope, remedy—the unjust working of the 2003 extradition treaty with the United States, which is unequal in procedure and in substance. It is a clear example of the law of unintended consequences. Presumably it was intended to gain favour with a powerful friend and ally at a time of great difficulty for that ally following September 11th, but it is actually souring that relationship and will continue to do so unless remedied.
	It is unequal in procedure because, as everyone knows, the United States Senate has not ratified the treaty whereas the Government brought it into effect on 1 January 2004, by order, in the United Kingdom. It is unequal in substance because there is no requirement for the United States authorities to show a prima facie case against defendants here. It was intended and defended largely as a means of dealing with terrorist offences but it is being used mainly against those accused of white-collar crime, particularly in the financial sphere, where the United States federal authorities seem to be setting themselves up as a global prosecutor. It seeks extradition in cases where the link with the United States is fairly tenuous—it may be only a message passed on the internet through a United States server—and in some cases where the offence could have been prosecuted in this country but has not been. I should add that neither of the two firms with which I am associated in the City has any direct involvement in such cases.
	The results are now piling up and are damaging. Some organisations with financial contacts across the Atlantic are beginning to operate in an atmosphere of anxiety and risk. There is a similar atmosphere of anxiety and restraint in dealing with our own regulatory authorities because of the fear that information given to them automatically crosses the Atlantic to United States authorities, which may use it in a way that would not be regarded as equitable in this country.
	This matter has been raised often—I have raised it in the past, as have many Members of this House and the other place—and the volume of protest has now grown and is deafening. I do not think there is any doubt about the damage being done to relationships across the Atlantic and I hope that the Minister will not again turn this indignation aside as if it is unreal, when it is the Government's stance that is unreal. As the United States has not ratified the treaty, it should not be too difficult to find ways of remedying the evil. I look forward to hearing and supporting amendments drafted in that sense by my noble friend Lord Kingsland.

Baroness Linklater of Butterstone: My Lords, this is a Bill covering a wide range of issues in both policing and justice, of which some are welcome and others, as we have already heard, are very controversial. It develops measures instituted over time by this Government, which here involve still further enhancing the powers of the Home Secretary and creating substantial new police powers, which are potentially worrying and require close scrutiny.
	My interest, as always, is in children and young people in the criminal justice system, where the Bill is relevant in a number of areas. In the policing aspect it relates to the new conditions for street bail granted by police to suspects who may be children and where there are important child welfare issues. There is also a standardisation of the powers and duties of community support officers, including the new power of "truancy sweeps". That is important since a large proportion of their work happens to relate to young people.
	In Part 3, there are new provisions to deal with anti-social behaviour arising from the creation of local authority oversight committees scrutinising crime and disorder reduction partnerships and the requirement on local councils to respond to a community call for action, which will directly affect young people. There is also an extension of those agencies which can enter into parenting contracts and apply for parenting orders—in particular, registered social landlords—which is especially inappropriate. Finally, in Part 4, there is the major proposal to amalgamate the five criminal justice inspectorates into one king-size inspectorate thereby merging decades of specialist knowledge and expertise which, as we have heard already around the Chamber, is a major cause for concern, particularly for the prisons inspectorate.
	There are real concerns over the proposal that the police powers to grant bail on the street should be extended to impose pre-charge conditions at the same time. The intervention of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, was particularly appropriate. The point was also echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. Worries have been expressed that, if inappropriately used, this could develop into a form of summary police justice. When we debated the Anti-social Behaviour Bill in 2003 there were particular concerns that, where young people and children were involved, there should be proper protection for them and an appropriate adult present, so that they would understand fully the implications of the whole process.
	An understanding of child welfare issues is always paramount, and appropriate welfare assessments by an arresting officer on the street may not be possible or even desirable. These concerns are now far greater when the process also involves the possibility of conditions of bail being put in place—what that means to a young person, who may have special needs or mental health issues or, simply by virtue of his or her age, not understand the implications, including those of non-compliance. We argued then, and we argue now, that the age limit for all appropriate safeguards for children and young people should be extended to include 17 year-olds. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us reassurance on this.
	Where community safety officers are concerned, it is clearly desirable that their powers and duties should be standardised. The "truancy sweeps", whereby they will now be able to take a child back to school or some other place, may well be very positive, albeit with limited long-term results unless the root cause of the truanting is also addressed. It is quite clear that there will have to be a significant investment in their training, particularly if they are to be involved in the enforcement of ASBOs, on which the definition of what constitutes anti-social behaviour is at best woolly. It is known that a high proportion of CSOs' work is with children and young people, and that almost 50 per cent of ASBOs are on young people. Since there are plans for the number of CSOs to be increased to around 24,000, unless and until they all have adequate training, particularly with young people, far from this added presence being a benefit, there will be serious risks for all concerned. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us on this point too.
	Two further areas in the Bill deal with anti-social behaviour and both require a great deal of further discussion. There is an extension of the role of local authorities, with a new duty on councillors to respond to the call for action if a resident feels that not enough is being done locally to deal with a problem of an anti-social nature. We have already seen with the Anti-social Behaviour Act what an unfortunate and unhelpful thing naming and shaming is. There are real concerns that this may become worse as a result of this new duty.
	More worrying is the proposed power of both local authorities and registered social landlords to apply for parenting contracts and parenting orders. Most authorities in this field agree that it is highly inappropriate for RSLs to have such a power. Their role is to deal with housing and not the intervention in such a sensitive and potentially momentous way in the lives of their tenants, particularly when the penalty for failing to comply with a parenting order becomes a criminal offence. It is imperative that social agencies with expertise in this area—we are dealing with such difficult family issues—work with families through parenting contracts and the range of supportive strategies available to them.
	However, the merging of the criminal justice inspectorates in Part 4, on which there was no time for a debate at Third Reading in the other place, is the cause for gravest concern—for the future of the prisons inspectorate in particular, although all five have particular roles and areas of expertise. Therefore it is in this House that we must give this issue the fullest attention. Again, there are some serious implications for children and young people.
	The argument is that the proposed amalgamation of five criminal justice inspectorates into one justice, community safety and custody inspectorate will rationalise their activities into a common framework, where they will become more effective and efficient, and that common methodologies, cycles and assessments will create better standards and co-ordination across the piece. This is a dangerously simplistic argument as far as the inspectorate of prisons is concerned. As Dr Silvia Casale, the distinguished president of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, has said:
	"The deprivation of liberty is fundamentally different from other criminal justice measures and has different legal and moral implications. Thus, inspecting the treatment and conditions of people in custody is of a different order to other inspections".
	Anne Owers, the current Chief Inspector of Prisons, explains that as well as focusing on the activities of prisons and beyond, their task is to focus on the details of the life of prisoners, and has much more to it than looking at issues of process, management or audit.
	Of necessity, much of what happens in prison is a closed world and quite hidden. As the Prison Reform Trust has said, prisons can go bad very quickly so the spotlight which the inspectorate can shine on conditions, from a completely independent and authoritative standpoint, has proved over and over again to be essential to exposing some shaming situations—in Norwich, Forest Bank and Woodhill, to name but a few—which in turn can act as a trigger and help the Prison Service to bring about improvement and change. Indeed, as has already been mentioned, the outstanding quality of the work of our prison inspectorate is acknowledged worldwide, as well as by our own Government; it is used as a model and leads the way in best practice. It is strange, therefore, to propose to subsume it into a far bigger, wider organisation which will inevitably dilute its capacity and impact.
	I want to echo the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, in saying that the key element to the success of the Prison Service's work has been its complete independence: the chief inspector comes from outside the service; it is independent in the use of its own criteria and methodology; its ability to criticise policy as well as practice; and its reliance on unannounced inspections. While none of these is specifically prohibited in the Bill, neither are they guaranteed in it. Indeed, Clause 30(3) states that the chief inspector must,
	"have regard to such aspects of government policy as the responsible ministers may direct".
	So the independence of inspections in future looks to be severely compromised. This is another area where a great deal of comfort has to be sought from the Minister.
	I have an added concern for the future of children and young people caught up in custody. Even within the highly specific and specialised field of prisons inspection there is the still further specialised work with juvenile prisoners. Currently, there are separate criteria, a different set of expectations and a dedicated, specialist team that adopts, as indeed it should, a child-centred approach. As any of us who have worked with vulnerable children knows, this work requires highly skilled and specialised professional experience, knowledge and understanding. It is in recognition of this that this specific team exists for inspecting YOIs. Its work is now part of the development of a memo of understanding with children's services, so that while HMI continues to inspect, it will feed its findings into a joint area review and into the broader spectrum of children's services. Thus, an understanding of the very different worlds of both custody on the one hand and of children on the other has to be sought from appropriate professionals.
	Finally, I urge the Minister not to forget the hidden world of the STCs, run by private companies, where children as young as 12 are imprisoned. Here inspections are done only by the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) because the relevant children are so very young. But it took an inquiry, chaired by my noble friend Lord Carlile, to highlight the extent of the use of restraint, during the course of which one child died, strip searching and solitary confinement. For as long as we continue to incarcerate children in this way, it would be more appropriate for HMI's expertise also to be involved in this area. There are fears for the future of the prisons inspectorate as a whole, but the fears for these even more specialist areas of work are greater still.
	It is sometimes helpful to look back and learn the lessons of the past. I have a sense of déjà vu here of a parallel moment in the social services back in the late 1960s, when I was a childcare officer. Just like today, the argument was made that there was a need to rationalise the range of services, to simplify, co-ordinate and bring under one umbrella work which had a great deal of overlap and common practice. Following the recommendations of the Seebohm Committee, the individual roles of childcare officers, psychiatric social workers and welfare officers among others were swept away, and with them, ultimately, went years of specialised knowledge and practice in the law and many other related fields. The individual departments vanished and the generic social worker was born, operating out of a social services department and working in a "multi-disciplinary team". Only one specialism remained: the probation officer, who alone has been allowed to retain his own distinct role. The result was not an improvement, but a diminution of provision, because it is impossible to retain those levels of specialism when subsumed into a bigger whole, and the work was, indeed, diluted. We could not be all things to all people. Now, indeed, many of the specialisms have returned of necessity in different guises. It seems to me that something similar is being proposed for the inspectorates. We should be very careful not to make the same mistakes again.
	I look forward to following the progress of this very important Bill over the next few weeks.

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, sometimes it is an advantage and sometimes a disadvantage to speak about a job that one has had the privilege of undertaking oneself. As the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, has already said, for five and a half years I served as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, a position which is covered in the Bill. It is an advantage because I had to do a job for which I did not apply and I had to learn how it was done, what was required, and so on, on the job. When I took the job I told the then Home Secretary that I would be grateful if I could still have two days a month to carry on with work that I was doing with the United Nations. However, it was immediately clear that that was a foolish request because inspecting prisons is a whole-time occupation and two days a month simply could not be spared.
	The most important part of the work was accompanying inspections. After hearing from my inspection team what they had found during the week, I would spend a whole day walking round a prison with the governor. I would spend an evening with the team discussing exactly what they had found and the following morning I would spend up to three hours with the governor and the management team of the prison, telling them precisely what we had found and the recommendations that we were going to make. They could then start to carry on from what I regarded not just as an inquisition but as a free consultancy which had the aim of helping them to move forward.
	The added advantage of such an inspection was that, of course, I was then able to speak first-hand to Ministers, the public and anyone about the state of things in the prisons that I had visited. When I heard a suggestion that the Inspectorate of Prisons would be subsumed into something far bigger, I was concerned that in future the chief inspector would not be able to give the amount of time that, by experience, I had found was essential if an inspection of those in custody is to be carried out properly and, in my way, what should be done in a humane system.
	The disadvantage is that you would expect me to say that, wouldn't you? I do not disagree with everything in the Bill; I speak only about Part 4. I applaud the intention to end the use of the Prison Service as accommodation for children, something that I recommended as long ago as 1997. But if I were to take a couple of texts for what I am to say, first, I would look back through military history to October 1809, to the ill-conceived, useless and mal-directed expedition to the island of Walcheren, in which my regiment took part; it was disastrous for disease as much as anything else. On the way back, a regiment passing my own on its way up shouted, "Good luck, the Rifles. You, too, are being made the sport of theory". Secondly, a very distinguished commander, who did not like long rules and regulations, when asked what were the most effective rules he had ever found, quoted a company that had only one rule: a breach of common sense is a breach of the rules.
	My theme is that the Inspectorate of Prisons is being made the sport of theory, in breach of common sense. How did that come about? It did not come about as a result of an Act of Parliament, as the first inspectors did in 1835, after a long period of prison reform, starting way back in 1773, which required that every prison should be inspected every year and reported on to Parliament through one of His Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State; nor did it come about as a result of an inquiry into the prison department and the reformation of the inspectorate in 1981, when Mr Justice May's report of 1979, originally put in place by the Labour government under Mr Callaghan, recommended the reformation of independent inspection, which had ceased in 1877. No, it came about in the Budget Statement of 2005, in which it was announced that the 11 public sector inspectorates were being rolled into four, in line with the Audit Commission's 10 principles of inspection of public services. Looking at those principles from the point of view of prisons, they filled me with horror, because the Inspectorate of Prisons does not inspect a public service; it inspects the treatment of and conditions for prisoners. No one inspects the Prison Service. Someone inspects the police service, the probation service, the Courts Service and the Crown Prosecution Service—the other four partners in the merger. Those four inspectors come from the services that they inspect and they act as professional advisers to Ministers on those services.
	The prisons inspectorate is entirely different, and I welcome the four principles of the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, as to what it does. They state that you are required to monitor and influence the treatment and conditions of prisoners and report on them as you find them; and you report on fact, not dictated by anyone. I found that the unannounced inspection was hugely valuable. Only once did I make the mistake of telling the Home Secretary that I was going to inspect a prison the following week. It was the only inspection that had been predicted when I got there.
	The Audit Commission states that:
	"Inspectors are also normally required to have regard to value for money considerations and as such there is an overlap with economic regulation".
	That is not the case with the prisons inspectorate. It is up to the people who receive the reports to look at the economic considerations. The inspectorate is instructed to be concerned with the treatment of and conditions for prisoners. The Office of Public Services Reform's review in 2003 found that the purpose of inspection was seen as providing assurance to the public. That is absolutely right. One of the principal reasons why independent inspection was restored in 1981 was that there was public disquiet at the self-regulation carried out by inspectors in a Home Office department who hid things that are now exposed.
	On 23 May this year, the new Home Secretary, commenting on the premature release of foreign national prisoners, told the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee:
	"I think when you embark on a review . . . if you find that the facts warrant a particular position then you should be prepared to countenance that".
	Those were wise words and I hope that the Minister will bear them in mind when she considers all that has been said about the inappropriate merger of something that has a totally different role into something that is broad and covers actions other than the treatment and conditions of prisoners. I am concerned about Clause 30, which has been mentioned, because when the chief inspector exercises his functions he must have regard to any aspect of government policy that responsible Ministers may direct. Prisons are not a party-political issue, nor should they be, because prisoners will be in prison whichever government are in power. It must be the duty of every government to ensure that the treatment and conditions of prisoners are appropriate and allow their resettlement into the community.
	The Government's protestations that the compromise inspectorate will be just as independent as at present are nonsense. Everyone is weakened by compromise. I was able to speak out because I was the independent Chief Inspector of Prisons and, as such, was required to do so by Parliament. I do not think that I could have done that if I had been the deputy chief inspector for justice, community safety and custody (prisons). My successor, to whom, rightly, great tributes have been paid in this House, has said that she is concerned about the quality of who might apply for the job of deputy chief inspector for justice, community safety and custody, and whether they might be able to speak out, or whether people might listen to them.
	I am very worried about a word that the Minister used and which I have also seen used in many other documents about inspection; that is, "modern". There is only one way of inspecting, and that is to go and see for yourself. I do not know what "modern" means in this context. I presume that it means following targets and performance indicators, producing reports and coming to a paper judgment. I am sorry, my Lords, but I do not believe that that is appropriate for the treatment and conditions of prisoners. You cannot do it on paper; you have to do it yourself.
	I also draw attention to something that has a slightly Alice in Wonderland ring about it, and which has already been mentioned: the optional protocol to the UN convention against torture, which the UK ratified in June 2004. Under that, all ratifying nations are required to have an independent monitoring of places of detention at national level. I have been asked to go to Geneva on Friday by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture to take part in a seminar on the formation of those independent monitoring boards on the grounds that we in the United Kingdom have the only board that currently meets what they think the requirements should be. When questioned about the absence—or the presence—of a national preventive mechanism in this country, a former Minister, Fiona Mactaggart, said that we did not actually need to form another one because we already had one in the independent Inspectorate of Prisons, which enabled us to satisfy the required conditions. However, I have just received an invitation from the Department for Constitutional Affairs to attend a conference on 13 June to discuss the formation of a national mechanism for the inspection of places of detention; it adds that practical details need to be worked out. If we have already got such a mechanism, which Ministers have recognised as such, why on earth is the Department for Constitutional Affairs having a conference to find it?
	That is as far as I would like to go because I know that we will introduce a number of amendments to bring out the details of what I have been saying in relation to every clause in Part 4. In an ideal world I would hope that, having listened to the arguments that have already been made, the Minister will withdraw the prisons inspectorate from the proposal. It has not, as we have heard, received due scrutiny in the other place. Sub-Committee D, which studied it and which has a government majority of seven to six, contained two Home Office Ministers, but it did not really get down to the subject of Part 4. That part was not discussed at all on Report because there was insufficient time. I therefore submit that while we must obviously look again at inspectorates from time to time, the proposal is not appropriate. I hope that when the time comes we will be able to dismiss becoming privy to the sport of theory and restore common sense.

Lord Waddington: My Lords, my noble friend told us that this was the 52nd Home Office Bill since 1997 and one is tempted to say, rudely, a fat lot they seem to have done for us. One of the points that should be made in that regard is to ask what has happened to the sort of machinery that used to exist within Government that imposed some sort of discipline on departments and encouraged them to limit the amount of legislation that they were minded to introduce. My noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell will remember as I do that a powerful Cabinet committee was mandated to keep some sort of check on the volume of legislation—powerful enough to say to a Home Secretary, "You've had your share and it really is not to your advantage nor to the advantage of your department to introduce yet another Bill". I can imagine nothing more calculated to restore the morale of a battered Home Office than a moratorium on Bills emanating from it. I put that forward as a realistic and sensible suggestion to the noble Baroness, who is always willing to listen with great care to suggestions, wherever they come from.
	The Bill contains lots of bits and pieces, many of which are pretty uncontroversial, but tucked away in Schedule 2, as was mentioned by the noble Baroness opposite, are big increases in the Home Office's powers over policing. This is not just the updating of existing powers, as the Minister suggested, but significant new powers. Take for a start the National Policing Improvement Agency. What is the purpose of the agency? It is to support implementation of the Home Secretary's key priorities for the police. That is not what I say but what the Home Office says. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, that the Home Office seems in no doubt as to who will own the agency. In its eyes it will be the Home Secretary's enforcement arm to enable him to get the policing he wants. That is the agency's aim and mandate.
	Schedule 2 hands to the Home Secretary sweeping powers to give directions to police authorities and to chief constables as to how to run their forces. Paragraph 24 of Schedule 2 gives the Secretary of State power to determine strategic priorities for policing. Paragraph 26 gives him power to direct a chief constable to take specific measures without reference even to the police authority, a matter referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Henig. The latter, I understand, was a proposal rejected by Parliament when it appeared in the Police Reform Bill in 2002. I am not certain about that, but I have a memory that it appeared then. Everyone said, "What nonsense", and that was the end of that. We must be very careful with this Government because, stealthily, they are inclined to reintroduce proposals dismissed with contempt only a few years before. We should be quite clear that what the Government are trying to thrust on us is not just regional forces but regional forces subject to greater control by the Home Office. The Bill fundamentally alters the present balance of the tripartite arrangement.
	As for police amalgamations, 12 years ago Mr Blair seems to have recognised the dangers of what the Government are now doing. He said:
	"A wholesale amalgamation of the smaller police services will remove local policing further from local people".
	He could see then, as we can see now, that if you create a police force that is responsible for an area twice or three times as big as the area covered by each of the forces that it replaces and you increase the membership of the police authority from 17 to, say, 23, many local communities, some of which may have special policing needs, will be completely unrepresented on the authority and there will be less public accountability. At the same time, it is obvious that a few regional forces will be far more easily controlled by the Home Office than the present 43.
	The Government have talked a great deal about community policing. I am certainly in favour of that. However, often what they call increased accountability at local level is not really accountability, but consultation. One should not confuse the two terms. Local officers will not be accountable in the true sense to local people. Rightly, they will remain accountable to their superiors. What needs reinforcing first and foremost is accountability at leadership level. Whether or not there will be effective accountability must depend on the structure and functions of police authorities. It is surely not right that the Secretary of State should seek the power under paragraphs 3, 10 and 11 of Schedule 2 to have those matters determined by order. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, about that.
	How police authorities are composed and what powers they should have should remain a matter for primary legislation. I think that there is a strong case for their being directly elected, as the Government proposed in 2003, but that is another matter. The cost of the proposed amalgamations has been a great worry, not least because of the Home Office's repeated changes of position. The Government's original offer had a flavour of blackmail about it. Last December's letter to the APA stated that only those police authorities volunteering to merge their forces by 23 December would get extra money to help them to do so. The extra money would be taken away from those who were not agreeable to mergers or not prepared to make decisions on the ridiculously tight timetable set by the then Secretary of State.
	The Government's present stance is very different. They say that they will pay all the net set-up costs, but only after savings, which they will not or cannot specify. Small wonder that there are rumours of an increase in the number of community support officers to allow for savings as a result of a reduction in the number of constables.
	In the police and in the police authorities, there is widespread opposition to what is proposed. In fact, only one amalgamation, that of Cumbria and Lancashire, has been agreed by both police authorities concerned. There have been court proceedings to try to stop the Home Secretary's plans and Labour Back-Benchers are, we are told, plotting rebellion when the order or orders come before the Commons.
	Judging by the polls, the public have no liking for the proposed amalgamations either. They want not new names for the forces responsible for their safety but a new war against violent crime, which has nearly doubled under Labour, and a new war against gun crime, which has almost doubled under Labour. It is no good the Minister trotting out the same old statistics about an overall reduction in crime. Some of the crime of which people are most frightened has increased the most. I have just cited two very good examples.
	Why should the public not be sceptical about the supposed advantages of larger forces? They read the papers and can see that some of the bigger forces apparently perform the worst. Dr Reid himself comes from a part of the country where the pressures are all for the break-up of large forces, such as Strathclyde, because they are inefficient and unresponsive to the public. We are told by the Home Secretary that, after nine years of Labour government, a big chunk of the Home Office, the IND, has been rendered unfit for purpose. The IND, and with it firm and fair immigration controls, seems to have taken a beating from Labour.
	I will pass no comment on what is going on in the rest of the Home Office but, from what I hear, it is suffering strains and a loss of confidence that was not obvious when I was there, serving under my noble friend Lord Hurd and, later, as Secretary of State. Surely, in those circumstances, the new Home Secretary is entitled to say, "I need time to sort out the mess that I have inherited and, for the moment, I will shelve new ventures".
	The only other thing that I want to say about the Bill relates to extradition. The Bill gives us the opportunity to revisit the Extradition Act 2003. The position that the Government have got themselves into is truly extraordinary. The treaty signed with the United States was unfair, because it was not reciprocal, but even that unfair treaty has not been ratified by the US. Yet, in December 2003, the Government proceeded to implement the Act by designating the USA under Sections 71 and 84, thus relieving the American authorities of the need to show, in the case of a request for extradition, evidence sufficient to show a case to answer.
	What is worse, the new power given to the American authorities seems to have been used to extradite not terrorists, but British businessmen whose acts about which complaint is made were committed in Britain but have not attracted the adverse attention of the British authorities. The present position is quite unsustainable. I hope that the Bill does not leave this place without our concerns being properly addressed.

Lord Borrie: My Lords, a Metropolitan Police advertisement for the recruitment of community support officers has been displayed on the London Underground for some weeks, under the strap line, "Make a visible difference". As I see it, the whole point of community support officers, first introduced some three or four years ago, is to be uniformed and visible in order to provide a very necessary reassurance to law-abiding citizens and perhaps some measure of deterrent to would-be malefactors. I am pleased that there seems to be widespread approval of the relatively new creation of community support officers and their role in neighbourhood policing, especially dealing with so-called low-level crime and anti-social behaviour. It seems sensible to give them a standard set of powers and duties, as set out in Clause 5, but I welcome the reminder made in the briefing from the Local Government Association which I have just received, that a community support officer is distinct and separate from a police constable. These additional responsibilities must not detract CSOs from their core duties of visible policing and community work.
	There was some concern, although perhaps it has disappeared because it has not been mentioned today, that CSOs might be a substitute for rather than an addition to the police force and, indeed, would make up for the somewhat declining number of special constables. However, I hope the Minister can confirm that it now seems that the number of special constables is rising once again.
	I see that the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, is now in his place—I rather missed him earlier. As has been the case with a number of other Bills, the noble Lord and others of a similar kind dealing with criminal justice issues have mentioned that this raises a cry that here is yet another Bill in which the Government are concentrating power on to themselves and centralising powers in various ways. When I look at this Bill I see a number of items which involve greater centralisation, but I also see a number of matters where local interests and powers are enhanced, hence the emphasis on neighbourhood policing, the greater involvement of communities and citizens in determining how their communities and police operate, and enhancing local crime and disorder reduction partnerships and their relationships with local authorities. It seems to me that the Minister, at the beginning of today's debate, was absolutely right to say that the traditional tripartite arrangement of the Home Secretary, the police authorities and the police is being brought to an end. There is no question that it is being brought to an end. Of course, however, the Government must admit—and, surely, no government could do otherwise—that it is desirable for there to be some kind of adjustment to the balance between those three parties to the tripartite agreement.
	The Government do not need to deny that some concentration is taking place. What they have to do is justify to Parliament what greater centralisation there may be in the Bill. As we have heard, accurately, this afternoon, because of the inadequacy of House of Commons debates, it often falls to the House of Lords to require this. Take, for example, in this Bill, the increase in the reserve powers to give directions to the police, provided for in Schedule 2. These powers can be justified because they are dependent on there being,
	"a failure of a police force to discharge any of its functions in an effective manner".
	It seems to me right that the Secretary of State should no longer be confined to information obtained from Her Majesty's inspectorate, but should be entitled to draw upon the findings of a public inquiry or national performance assessments.
	Therefore, I regret to say that I am not sure that I agree with my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey. It is equally right that the Secretary of State should be required by the Bill to give the police authority and the chief constable the opportunity to make representations against the Secretary of State's prima facie view that the force is failing, and to propose remedial measures. As I understand it, only if serious performance problems persist is the Home Secretary entitled to intervene. In the other place, the Conservative spokesman seemed to pour scorn on the Government's assertion that these powers of direction would only be used as a last resort, but Schedule 2, in its detail, lays down clear duties to that effect on the Home Secretary. That is as it should be.
	Many of your Lordships on both sides of the House have expressed concern about Part 4, which involves amalgamation of the various inspectorates dealing separately with prisons, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the probation service and court administration. The aim of these provisions is, to my mind, exceedingly ambitious, if not over-ambitious: it is to report on the functioning of the justice system as a whole. That nothing should be excluded and that the whole justice system should be inspected from time to time is fully justified and worthwhile. But, inevitably, it raises the question of whether the creation of this massive new body will result in a loss of focus, which each of the bodies to be replaced currently has. At present, though one could not have foreseen this six months ago—though one should have—it seems ironic that the proposal emanates from a department of state, the Home Office, which is itself subject to intense criticism for being unwieldy—or "cumbersome," as the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, put it earlier this afternoon—and unmanageable.
	In the prison inspectorate there is particular concern about this matter, as we have heard from several voices this afternoon. In recent years we have had such excellent chief inspectors as the present one, Anne Owers, the late Judge Stephen Tumim, who came from a judicial background, and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, from a military background. Each and every one of them, from their varying backgrounds, was an independent person from outside the Prison Service. That is the most vital matter. Small wonder, therefore, that there should be such anxiety as expressed here today, and indeed elsewhere, as to how one super-chief inspector can possibly have the ability and time to carry out the inspections required, and to concentrate not only on prisons, but on all the other responsibilities proposed by the Government. Anne Owers, the present Chief Inspector of Prisons, has written an article in the current New Statesman in which she describes the Government's plans as "reckless." I hope the Minister can give some comfort on this issue. I was more impressed by the four key points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, than by the 10 principles referred to as those of the Audit Commission.

Lord Marlesford: My Lords, I start by apologising very humbly to the House and the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, in case I am unable to stay until the very end. I have a long-standing family commitment, which I cannot really get out of. This 52nd Bill is perhaps different from the others in being the first to be produced from the Home Office against the astonishing backdrop of the remarks of the Secretary of State, Dr John Reid, to the Home Affairs Committee on 23 May. He referred to the Home Office as "dysfunctional," "probably needing wholesale transformation" and
	"having inadequate leadership and management systems".
	He ended with "not fit for purpose", a phrase which will join the lexicon of catalytic political phrases such as "a week is a long time in politics" and "the unacceptable face of capitalism" which echo down the decades. On Thursday we will have a debate, put forward by my noble friend Lord Fowler, which will enable some of us to make practical offerings as to how the Home Office might be able to improve its performance.
	I want to make only two basic points. First, I want to say a word about this astonishing proposal to amalgamate the five inspectorates. Both sides of the House have gone into this in considerable detail, with no points of praise whatever. But, in a way, it is not astonishing—in my view, it is quite explicable—because the Home Office has always disliked criticism. Perhaps we all dislike criticism, but what the Home Office really dislikes is public criticism—and the whole function of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons must be, and has always been, to be able to publicly criticise the Home Office, the Government and the Prison Service for what is done. That is why, of course, in accordance with the best practice of "Yes Minister"—a skill which the Home Office has in spades—the Government have decided to dilute the possibility of future criticism by putting in five different inspectors-general. So, in future, the space occupied by the inspector-general of the Prison Service will be very much diluted.
	I believe that this House is likely to reject the proposals for amalgamation in the Bill. If it does so, I suspect that it will be inclined to play ping-pong with the Bill and, from the way in which he has at least started, I have sufficient confidence in the new Home Secretary to believe that he will not be inclined to use the Parliament Act to force it through. I therefore think it is rather unlikely that this amalgamation will reach the statute book.
	The only other thing I wish to do is to give the Minister notice that I intend to bring back, after Clause 10, my earlier proposal to give the police powers to close areas and to search for guns where they think they might be found. It will be the third time that I have brought forward the proposal. The Home Office argued against it in the past but its judgment is perhaps not quite so almighty nowadays. The Home Office says that it does not like it and the police say that they do not like it, but the police do not always get it right. For a long time they opposed identity cards but have now changed their minds.
	The Minister said that one of the objects of the Bill is to update the existing powers of the police to ensure that they can operate successfully. On the earlier occasions on which I brought forward the proposal, it had the support of both my own party and the Liberal Democrats, and the Liberal Democrat Front Bench made some very convincing interventions. The real point of the proposal is to give a very clear public mandate for the police to do something about which the public mind enormously—that is, to control gun crime. I believe that if this power is in the Bill the public will have confidence that it can be used and will expect it to be used. This will help the police to use it, which will mean there will be less gun crime. The fact that it could also, to some extent, apply to knife crime is an added advantage.
	With that brief intervention in the debate, I hope the House will make substantial changes to the Bill so that when it eventually reaches the statute book it will have more credit and more success than many of its 51 predecessors.

Viscount Tenby: My Lords, one of the drawbacks of being last man in is that it is not one's task to sum up, although I cannot help referring to some of the quite outstanding contributions that have been made in today's debate. It also means, of course, that the best targets have already been peppered by well directed fire from far better shots than me.
	This is a very important Bill which requires the fullest scrutiny because of its constitutional implications, a scrutiny which I am sure it will receive in this House. I am also sure that, with her customary conscientiousness and charm, the Minister will seek to deflect many of the genuine concerns expressed today. However, I have to advise her that she faces an uphill struggle on a number of fronts.
	I hope the House will forgive me if I concentrate initially on an issue which has not attracted the most attention today but which, nevertheless, is of constitutional and operational importance—namely, the position of the magistracy. In doing so, I declare an interest as a magistrate, now on the supplementary list, and as a former member of a police authority, although, of course, as is customary in this House, I speak personally.
	In my experience, the magistrates are invariably, in the world of the law, everyone's favourite aunts and uncles. From High Court judges to passing Ministers of every political hue—and, believe me, there have been a good many in recent years—they are invariably depicted as the jewel in the British judicial system. If I had a fiver for every time that I heard this in my time on the Bench, I could be well and truly in the money. Yet whenever changes are afoot because of some malfunction, who do we invariably see in the firing line? Why, justices of the peace. I entirely accept that delays, especially in dealing with minor offences, are a continuing scandal, but instead of dealing with the inadequacies and incompetence in other agencies, which are the principal reason for such delays, we must apparently instead give additional powers—particularly with regard to bail and conditional cautions—to the CPS and the police, thereby cutting out the inconvenience of a judicial hearing.
	Bail is a serious matter, both for the individual concerned and possibly for the public too in certain instances. Correct assessment of cases requires both training and experience and the sort of publicity which is only available through open court, with reasons provided for decisions reached. However unfair it may be, there will undoubtedly be a feeling of a done deal—perhaps even a stitch-up—between the prosecuting authorities if these measures are implemented as they stand. In some instances, defendants could find themselves with a criminal record never having appeared in court. I should add that the Select Committee on the Constitution has drawn attention to this potential constitutional danger.
	I turn now to the matter of the police authorities and magisterial representation. Quite apart from the widespread unease about the composition of such bodies being a matter for secondary legislation—and, therefore, basically left to the whim of a Home Secretary—the proposal to remove the obligation to have magistrate representatives on a police authority in future beggars belief and has aroused the opposition of the Magistrates' Association, the Association of Police Authorities and the police themselves. Try as I have to find some scintilla of a logical argument for this proposal, I have failed, other than to hazard a guess that in an effort to get the size of future authorities down—something which, in itself, may not be a bad thing—the Home Office has said, to paraphrase Shakespeare, "Let's kill all the JPs".
	But if we are, at long last, trying to get joined-up and expert advice in the fight against organised crime and terrorism, what sort of sense does it make to get rid of what is arguably the most experienced element in these matters on any authority? Is it too much to suggest that one obligatory magistrate stays on and, say, one of the business representatives drops off, anathema though that may be to the present Government? With, correctly, so many elected local representatives on the body, can I—appropriately from these Benches you may feel—make a plea for at least some independent element, something which would be provided by the retention of a representative from the Bench?
	Turning to other matters, in principle I welcome the creation of the National Policing Improvement Agency, particularly in relation to its powers of overseeing good practice in procurement and in being able to check on the contracting-out in design and delivery. In all the justified excitement and unease about future police force mergers, I have now—forcefully, I hope—made the point on two separate and recent occasions that, irrespective of whether one ends up with 43, 33, 23 or 13 forces, or any other number one cares to think of, if there is IT and system incompatibility the war against serious crime and terrorism is fatally compromised. Again, in this context, does the creation of this agency signal an end to the indifference of the Home Office to what equipment chief constables order on their own initiatives—equipment which, because of Treasury constraints, is often the cheapest available and frequently incompatible with other forces? Also, what proposals are there to gather together the separate Special Branch elements which reside within individual police forces where they are scattered about the country, in what has been a historic and slightly arbitrary way?
	There are of course many other concerns raised by the Bill, not least those relating to the establishment of a Chief Inspector for Justice, Community Safety and Custody and how that will affect in particular the prison inspection regime referred to by my noble friends Lord Ramsbotham and Lady Stern, and the noble Lord, Lord Hurd of Westwell, in what were very powerful speeches indeed. I will only say that I share their dismay at this possible infliction on the system.
	However, I finally refer to something that is absent from the Bill but which has been referred to by several noble Lords today—the omission of any mechanism to amend the Extradition Act passed by this House in 2003 in so far as it affects our relations with the US. I remember the occasion well. We were invited to support yet another measure in the fight against terrorism and I—and I suspect many other noble Lords—voted for the measure on that basis. Was I naive? Yes, in the light of subsequent events, and short-sighted and unimaginative too—I plead guilty on all those charges. But two principal developments have emerged from the situation. The number of requests for extradition from US authorities for non-terrorist cases has far exceeded those with possible terrorist associations. Secondly, the reciprocity promised by the US Government has failed to materialise. Thanks to opposition in Congress, possibly due, as some believe, to reluctance to part with IRA suspects, who are literally leading the life of Reilly on the American subcontinent, there is little sign of the Act being implemented there in the future. This Bill offers an opportunity to correct that inequity and I am hopeful that, not for the first time, this House will take up its role as the defender of our liberties.

Baroness Seccombe: My Lords, I add my thanks to the Minister for her introduction to the Bill, and thank noble Lords who have contributed to this Second Reading debate. There have been knowledgeable, powerful and, indeed, passionate contributions from all sides of the Chamber that have highlighted only too clearly the fact that this Bill has a very long way to go before it meets the high standards which this House sets for legislation.
	We recognise the negative impact that crime and anti-social behaviour can have upon neighbourhoods and communities, in particular upon the lives of children and young people, who are the future of our country. However, on balance, I argue that the Bill provides more cause for concern than comfort. Three significant areas that have been raised today are police reorganisation, the merging of the criminal justice inspectorates and our extradition arrangements with the US.
	I will not go into the detail of what has already been so aptly set out, but suffice it to say that once again we are faced with smoke and mirrors as the Government claim that they are handing the power back to communities, making local policing more accountable, yet all the while the Bill increasingly centralises power in the hands of the Secretary of State.
	I have been both an elected county council member of a police authority and a magistrate member. I wholeheartedly support the views of the noble Viscount, Lord Tenby, on magistrate members of a police authority.
	We have good grounds for caution regarding the powers set out in Part 1 when we consider how the Home Secretary's predecessor, having failed in his use of "bully and bribe" tactics, is now forcing through changes of great constitutional significance despite little consultation and strong opposition from the police authorities. Indeed, I believe that the four chief constables of Wales have recently withdrawn support for the restructuring and have submitted a formal objection. As we have heard in recent days, legal challenges have begun around the country. I hope that the Minister can confirm whether that is correct.
	My honourable friend in another place highlighted the report of Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary, Denis O'Connor, on which the Government are relying for the police merger plan, and made this very point:
	"The constitutional implications . . . are significant".
	This Bill will confer very significant new powers on the Home Secretary to interfere with police forces and authorities. Clause 2 provisions will give him wide powers to prescribe the membership of police authorities, and new powers to intervene in police forces. That will scrap the statutory duty on police authorities to determine local policing objectives, replacing it with additional rules from the Home Secretary. It will put basic command units on a statutory footing—an apparently unnecessary provision, but one that the Association of Police Authorities believes may be the precursor to more direct Home Office control. I reiterate the association's warning that,
	"These provisions represent a fundamental constitutional change, and a significant shift in the balance of power within the tripartite relationship".
	Clauses 4 to 6 in Part 1 address issues to do with community support officers. We will seek to tease out the detail and address the concerns of the Standing Committee on youth justice, among others. I am glad that the Standing Committee and the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Children have produced briefing and a child impact assessment on the Bill, and look forward to full debates on those issues in Committee.
	The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and my noble friend Lord Hurd have highlighted the combined concerns of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, the Prison Reform Trust, the Magistrates' Association, NACRO and the Howard League for Penal Reform, to name but a few. There is an overriding concern that the prisons inspectorate's wealth of experience, expertise and independence will be lost in the proposed single inspectorate in Part 4. That would be a seriously backward step for a body which has obtained universal recognition and respect for its work, as was so vividly illustrated by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham.
	We will pay careful attention to details of Part 6 on extradition. As your Lordships have said, there are concerns surrounding the lack of safeguards in the Extradition Act 2003. There is a significant debate to be had regarding the balance of the UK-US extradition treaty, which remains a one-sided operation until it is ratified by Congress—a prospect that I fear is not close to hand.
	The Bill also provides for the amalgamation of various police and court functions, for example powers regarding bail conditions and conditional cautions in Clauses 7 and 12. These have given rise to fears that the police will become investigator, prosecutor and judge, and that extending these powers could give rise to summary justice made, as the Bill currently stands, without proper support or training. The Magistrates' Association is not alone in considering that such processes are contrary to the principles of justice if punishment is to be imposed without the involvement of the judiciary. The traditional separation of powers is a vital part of our constitution and is entrenched in previous legislation. It should not be altered lightly.
	We must not forget to set this Bill against the context of chaos at the Home Office. One cannot help but think, as we turn our attention to what my noble friend Lady Anelay has highlighted as the 52nd Home Office Bill since 1997, about what is potentially slipping through the net in legislative terms, especially when the bulk of the Bill is not discussed in the guillotined debates in the other place. Indeed, in the light of the new Secretary of State's comments on reorganisation, I wonder whether we are to expect additional new clauses from the Government. I hope the Minister will indicate whether that is so and undertake to give the Members of this House the fullest time possible for their consideration should they arise.
	Our detailed scrutiny is all the more important, especially if we are to rebuild public confidence in our police forces. Effective policing, including preventing, reducing and detecting crime and providing safety and security, is at the heart of civil society. I believe all Members of your Lordships' House agree with the aspirations of the recent Respect Action Plan, to create a decent, civil society in which people can shape their lives and participate fully in their communities. We on these Benches look forward to working constructively with the Minister and her team, throughout the progress of the Bill, on the significant and varied concerns raised here today. But, first, we look forward to her response.

Lord Parekh: My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for initiating this very important debate, and for talking about it with great conviction and learning.
	No subject could be more important than this one. History is a record of society's collective memories, and a story of the formation of its identity. How history is taught is therefore vital in helping us to understand and define ourselves, and in shaping our future actions. The noble Lord rightly concentrated on national history, so I should like to concentrate on the international dimension of the way in which history is taught in our schools. I shall make four or five points for a response from the Minister.
	I am not entirely sure whether we are clear in our minds about the purpose of history teaching. By and large, it seems to be thought that the job of history teaching, apart from giving certain basic facts and figures, is ultimately to foster some kind of love of the country or patriotism. That was one of the major reasons why Mrs Thatcher disapproved of the findings of the national curriculum working party on the teaching of British history. That working party wanted to concentrate on the slave trade, opium wars and the British conquest of India, among other subjects, and Mrs Thatcher was not entirely happy about that. She unfortunately was not the only one. I can think of many people in other political parties who more or less shared the same view. That is deeply troubling.
	The attempt to link history teaching with the cultivation of patriotism is fraught with all kinds of dangers. It inevitably falsifies history and leads to much myth-making and even lies. It also ill-equips future citizens to see their country as it is, and makes them unduly defensive and frightened when the darker side of the country's history is pointed out to them. It also politicises history because it implies that those who foster patriotism, or the great figures in our history, will vary from one political party to another and so make history into a political football.
	History is an academic discipline; it is not a morality tale in which good always triumphs over evil and we find ourselves always on the side of good. Its purpose is to tell us who we were, how we came to be what we are, and what options are open to us as we plan our future. In other words, the purpose of history is to facilitate self-understanding and to give us self-knowledge. It cannot be the vehicle of moral values or political ideologies, or a belief in national or racial superiority, or a kind of collective psychotherapy that is intended to make us feel good about ourselves. I cannot emphasise the academic character of history enough. The purpose of history is to force us to see ourselves as we are, warts and all. That is its highest and only gift. We should not try to turn it into a vehicle for cultivating a certain body of what we like to call British values.
	My second point is that our history teaching generally, though not always, tends to have a Eurocentric thrust. All the great values of our civilisation are supposed to be our own creation, and others have contributed very little to it. We ignore the great contributions of China, India, the Arabs and Islam, as well as the fact that many of the values of our civilisation had long been known to others. Tolerance, for example, was practised in India in the 4th century BC under King Ashoka. That is also true of the spirit of critical inquiry and scientific rationalism. Unless we highlight all this to our youth and get them to appreciate that all the great human achievements are the product of contributions drawn from all parts of the world, we shall be unable to equip them to live in our diverse world.
	Thirdly, I refer to the place of black and ethnic minorities in our society, and how their history is handled. By and large, the discussion is either limited to black history month or to topics on slavery or post-war immigration. That implies that their arrival is recent, or that they were passive victims of our history. In fact, blacks and ethnic minorities have been here since Roman times. They were a significant presence in the 16th and 17th centuries. They fought in the Napoleonic wars, not to mention the First and Second World Wars of the 20th century. They do not, therefore, operate on the margins of society. They are central to our composition and to our understanding of who we are. It is about time that we mainstreamed their presence in the understanding of our history.
	It is in this context that we might be a little more at ease in how we handle the history of the British Empire. There has been much discussion among politicians and others about whether the empire was a good or a bad thing, but that is not the way in which to approach the matter. The empire arose at a certain point in history as a result of certain forces in our society, and produced certain good and bad consequences. If these consequences were bad, we should not be ashamed to admit them. After all, we did not commit these acts ourselves. If our forebears did them, we can say that they acted according to the light and that in retrospect we think they could have acted differently. I simply cannot understand why we feel slightly uncomfortable or nervous in dealing with the history of the British Empire.
	My fourth point has to do with the teaching of European history. I feel strongly that Germany generally tends to suffer the most in that teaching. Germany is reduced, by and large, to Hitler and the Nazis. As a result, the great past and the great post-war achievements of that country tend to be ignored. Even more important, a myth is created that Germany has always been our enemy. In fact, for centuries Germany has been integral to our self-understanding. In the 19th century, Germany's influence was very much present in the creation of our language, our history, our self-understanding, our culture, our philosophy and music. I cannot think of any part of our culture which is not traceable to an enormous contribution from Germany. In a sense, our failure to come to terms with Germany says more about ourselves than about the country.
	The last point, on which I would like to end, has to do with how history teaching has increasingly become modularised and therefore reduced to isolated periods. Pupils in our schools concentrate on this or that period, and that is just about the end of it. As a result, there is no sense of narrative. There is no time for wider reading, and even less time to reflect on the significance of great events and on the human stabilities and heroic qualities that are on display in history. In other words, in modularising history in this way, human beings tend to fall out of the view and history becomes a mask of inert and meaningless data.

Lord Addington: My Lords, I have a certain feeling about this debate as the first time that I received a letter of complaint from one of my own political party was after a debate on the teaching of history. That was about 17 years ago. It was the first time that I have inspired such a thing from my own party, although it will probably not be the last.
	Everyone has an opinion on history and the way we use it. The degree of informed opinion depends on who you are talking to because it is impossible to be an expert on all of history. We tend to go to the bits we like, remember them, stand on them and forget about the rest. I have a little saying that all nations worth their salt can drown in their own sins. We can all choose the example of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, who did not like to be reminded that we fought a war against the most populous nation on earth, which was militarily badly organised, to sell it hard drugs. That is probably something which the rest of us could do without having in our historical bag, but it is there.
	What brought me to this debate was the idea of citizenship and what we are going to do with history now. The guidelines on the teaching of citizenship, for example, deal with human rights and responsibilities underpinning society and the basic aspects of the criminal justice system, and how they both relate to young people using history. You can go through selecting which bit of history you want and of course come up with examples.
	If one assumes that we should be where we are now if there was not a better alternative, the Marxists, the Whig historians and so forth will say that it was part of the process or that we would have got here; others will say, "No, it is chance". Lord Russell, one of the great revisionist historians of recent times, would probably have had a considerable amount to say about what did happen. There is no inevitability about it happening. Why should we be here? The minute we start to look for moral justification about the present and what has gone on before we are on very shaky ground. Where do we go from here? Why does this have to happen? I do not know.
	The noble Lord, Lord Luke, mentioned Magna Carta. One interpretation of Magna Carta is of a group of armoured heavies with hereditary backing demanding their rights under the existing system, which were being infringed by a monarch who was getting a bit above himself. Simon de Montfort carried on that argument. Such people started parliamentary democracy. It is fanciful to think that some of these great Anglo-French nobles who were fighting with other Anglo-French nobles over recently conquered territory would be interested in the outcome of elections. They had recently taken over from the Danes as the rulers of the English territory—another way of looking at us. Yet, people will justify that line of logic. We must always be very careful about how we use the past to justify the present.
	The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, talked about Germany. We had the German royal family, and still do. Just because Germany has one blip in its history does not omit everything else, but people think that.
	On the teaching of history, World War II was the first great war conflict to have large quantities of film and sound made of it, so we have a better record. We are only just coming to the end of personal recollections of what went on in that conflict. So we all have an over-emphasis. You will always have over-emphasis in periods of history that will colour the perception of what is important for the historians writing at a given moment. They will always think that their experience is probably the most important—the culmination. So, if we use history in education, first, the accuracy of what we say is totally subjective; secondly, if we state that we are going to look at history, we must of course look at everything that has gone on, which means that you will always have questions; and, thirdly, there are no right answers to historical questions as you are talking about the interpretation of events and about the record that is currently accepted.
	The interpretation will go on and on. When I was doing a history degree Lawrence Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper, were arguing bitterly on what was seen to be the establishment argument. New arguments will be brewing now, and so it will carry on. We should always be very careful about how we look at this subject because tomorrow's truth may not be one we recognise.

The Lord Bishop of Norwich: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for enabling us to debate this important subject. Christianity is often described as an historical religion, but I am prompted to speak more because I owe a great deal to some fine history teachers at my grammar school 40 years ago. The excitement that they conveyed about the significance of the past as a living reality in the present caused me to read history at university. Their teaching gave me a sense of belonging to this country and of valuing the continuities and the discontinuities between the past and the present. It was the experience of living history that helped me to recognise that Christianity could be both historical and contemporary. That commitment gave me an enlarged sense of common humanity.
	I take seriously all that the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, said in his speech, and I am very conscious of how a nurse from a Norfolk vicarage, Edith Cavell—who must have been nurtured in a very patriotic way having nursed prisoners of war—when facing the firing squad in 1915, said: "Patriotism is not enough". And of course it is not.
	I want to make one modest suggestion, ask a question and make an observation. The Government seem very keen on encouraging or teaching citizenship, but that often sounds a rather woolly concept to me. I cannot but think that a stronger place in the national curriculum and increased resources for the teaching of history in our schools might produce more informed citizens in the next generation without having to invent some strange new discipline cut loose from the historical moorings that it needs. Does the Minister recognise the strong connection between the place of history in the curriculum, taught well and properly, and a lively sense of citizenship? I suggest that, instead of thrashing around to find out what Britishness is all about, often reduced to a vague belief in tolerance and the importance of queuing, we already have in the teaching of history—its darker side as well as its better side—a vehicle for a better informed future electorate, one that might understand that our legal, religious, social and economic life is grounded in historical development; it is not something that stands still at all.
	Teaching values without any sense of where they might have come from is often fruitless, so I would love to see us nourishing our collective memory as a means of consolidating a collective identity, which includes every citizen in this country. Like many bishops, I am a frequent visitor to schools and I have also had children at home who, until relatively recently, were studying history for GCSEs and at A-level. As we have already heard, I observe that today's school pupils seem to know a great deal about relatively short historical periods. I have lived in a home where there once appeared to be almost continuous study of the Tudors and Hitler and Stalin, but nothing much in between. That makes the learning of history episodic. Perhaps that is because we are liable to concentrate not on grand movements in history but on the great personalities of the past, which is a sort of reflection back of our celebrity culture today. I suspect that that is why we do it.
	I know that the answer, "That's not my period", is given by many historians to any question about 10 years outside their specialism, but am I correct in thinking that specialism now starts very early and that the broader sweep of history is suspect? If the broader sweep of history is suspect, where does that leave us? Does it matter? I think that it might, if learning becomes disconnected.
	My observation comes from living next door to Norwich Cathedral, which has a fine education department. Some 13,000 school pupils of different ages and backgrounds and from different contexts came to the cathedral last year, many using the cathedral to complete projects not simply in religious education—which is rather a minority subject in this use of the cathedral—but in science, history and other disciplines as part of their studies. Getting to know this historical building, which is such a vibrant living centre of daily life, worship and other activities, proves immensely appealing. Many children and young people come expecting to be bored and find that they are fascinated. That is because of the imagination of our education officers and what they offer.
	But I observe that schools now seem to find it much more demanding to bring pupils for this sort of experience. It is the scale of supervision required and the assessment of the risks involved that make them cautious. I sometimes wonder whether the regulatory frameworks that we have created limit imagination and risk in some areas of our learning. I also observe that sources of funding for the development of this work are much less plentiful from statutory sources than one might think given that our cathedrals and parish churches are the great carriers of living history. We see that as part of our mission in our cathedral, but sometimes we still face suspicions that it is some narrowly proselytising endeavour. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and character of Christian faith in the context of the history of this country.
	Ours is a society so rich in history and historical artefacts that I suspect that we can take history and its teaching for granted and that many people simply think that we absorb it somehow. Again I thank the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for initiating the debate and for drawing attention to such an important subject for the country's future.

Lord Dearing: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Luke, for introducing this debate and congratulate him on his sense of timing. It so happens that the curriculum authority is reviewing the whole of the key stage 3 curriculum and A-levels. So, in this debate, we have a chance to influence that body and the department, which will take the final decisions.
	I am also conscious that Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, in a report published last October, urged a complete review of the history curriculum. The factors that were in mind at the time were that only 30 per cent were then choosing to do history at GCSE and even fewer at A-level and beyond. That is sad. The inspector commented that part of the reason for that is that, for some students, the subject is bookish and inaccessible and, to others, not important.
	I want to make a few comments: not in the form of a curriculum but about some of the elements that can make history exciting, relevant and, at the same time, a vehicle through which to develop general skills of researching a subject, forming a judgment and producing a balanced argument.
	Perhaps I may begin with some elements and then turn to key stage 3 and A-levels. First, if there is to be the excitement, to which more than one noble Lord has referred, in a history lesson the teacher must be excited about the subject. A good national curriculum for history is one that gives a framework but leaves plenty of scope for the teacher to meet the interests of his or her pupils and to express his or her enthusiasms. Then it comes alive. I see a history curriculum, especially in the private schools, as being about: "It is my school's history curriculum, which incorporates the national history curriculum". There should be that freedom.
	Secondly—the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, referred to this—an element of good teaching in history is making use of modern communications technology, both in the classroom, on the whiteboard, and for pupils afterwards on computer. Let me be more explicit. Especially at primary level, where language skills, especially reading, are still at a developmental level, visual images are very expressive and powerful. It so happens—I think that it is still so—there is a tradition that during the early years, children are able to encounter the great civilisations of the past such as Greece, Egypt and, perhaps, in modern times, further afield, in south America. They often study the succession of invading peoples, starting from the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and then the Normans. Those are powerfully expressed visually because they are characterised by dress, ornaments, vehicles, battles and so on.
	I agree more with the noble Lord, Lord Luke, than the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, about heroes. In bringing history to life, you must have heroes and villains. I remember a teacher who enthralled me in history. He took us through the French Revolution and I sat spellbound. I was clear that Danton was a villain. "No, no, no", he said, "He was my hero. He had bad faults, but Robespierre was the villain". We discussed that and that brought it and the class to life. There are modern analogues.
	Yes, it could be political, but I do not think that that has to be identified. For example, was not Churchill recently voted the first of the Britons? Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineer, was voted the second. But for the war, Churchill would have been a rather unimportant failure. He was the man for the time. I believe in seeing those people within their context, with their limitations. Nelson had his limitations, as well as being a very great person. I should like history to encompass a great engineer, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, or a scientist, such as Faraday; Mrs Pankhurst in the history of developing a democracy; and Queen Elizabeth in serving her nation with great courage. I should like to include people, but in their context—not entirely in praise, but understanding their limitations.
	Good history, especially at primary level, involves hands-on learning and exploring one's own locality. I saw this wonderfully done at the cathedral recently, for people living in Southwark. Children were acting a role. This brings history to life for them, and they do not forget it. Of course, not all of us have something like that, but we have a village church, chapel or school, which is interesting. It is not just a school; it is about asking why it is there and putting it into its historical context. Even the village post office, missed though it is, is interesting because of the way in which it developed as a response to an historical need—from the time of the penny post in 1840 and so on—and to the railways. History could be about exploring a local hero, personality or event, but hands-on history—the kids talking to the grandparents about something, for instance—is what brings it to life and gets them seeing history as something to be researched rather than read about in a book.
	I shall move very rapidly to the key stage 3 curriculum. I would like it to be a chronological survey of what happened in the making of the realm, starting perhaps at 1066 and going through to the Act of Settlement and modern times, and, in so doing, identifying two or three issues of current concern, such as Northern Ireland, which is a problem for us that was inherited from history. I would like children to explore the Commonwealth and the development of the rocket, so that they understand that it took us centuries to develop rockets and understand why such a development does not take root easily in Africa or other parts of the world. It did not happen quickly here.
	Finally, I am conscious that history, like geography, is one of the humanities that are no longer compulsory. I would like there to be a very challenging and enriching opportunity to study and research several topics in depth and to an A-level standard, which would bring in not only historical roots, but geography, world poverty, art—where it applies—and religion, too. Let me give an example. The noble Lord, Lord Roberts, referred to the competition among European nations for empire in Africa and the Middle East. There is the transition, particularly for us, from empire to Commonwealth, and the good, the bad and the remaining problems. Let them study what happened in the first 50 years of the 20th century. Let them study Britain, Palestine and the Balfour Declaration, as well as what happened after the war and what the situation is now. I could give other examples, but time is running out. I want these kids to be able to research, debate and form logical arguments and judgments. I believe that history taught in this way is a valuable education; it is stimulating and relevant and, as George Santayana said, if they understand the past, they will not repeat so many of the mistakes.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. I have to admit to a professional fascination for discussing history teaching. I started life as an historian, and I studied it at university in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In those days, it was really quite straightforward; there was a narrative. I studied English history and European history, which are of course entirely separate and totally unconnected. The only course we had on extra-European history was entitled, "The expansion of Europe". It was about how Europe had taken over China, India and all the other places, and it all fitted together. One of the problems that we must recognise is that that all fell apart in the 1960s, and we cannot put it together again. Part of the reason why all the history that my children learnt at school was about the Vikings, the Tudors, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler is that we have not yet managed to put it back together again. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, that we cannot leave it to the curriculum working party to devise a new key stage 3. We must have a much broader debate.
	Since I left university, I have learnt much more about medieval history than the rather dreadful stuff that I was taught at the University of Cambridge. I intend, as my retirement project, to write what I hope will be a useful little book on how the development of the 12th and 13th-century Yorkshire economy was intimately linked to Florentine banks. The monks, after all, sold their wool crop to Italian bankers until the English Crown of Edward I bankrupted the Bardi and Peruzzi banks. The extent to which 12th and 13th century European economic integration caught England and Scotland up in itself is something that I had simply not begun to understand, because I was taught by good old-fashioned English Protestant historians.
	When we talk about history, as the Government have begun to say, we are of course talking about identity, citizenship, Britishness and British values. We recognise, as the noble Lord, Lord Luke, said, that we need a story—a narrative. The reason popular history is so alive and academic history in so much trouble is that academic history cannot agree on a narrative. That is what people most like.
	Linda Colley said in the Guardian the other week that we need,
	"a standardised, chronological history of Britain [which] should become part of the national curriculum [because] . . . schoolchildren need to learn. For how can they grow up to be British citizens if they haven't a clue how Britain came to be what it is?".
	We will leave aside for now the question of what Britain is; the question of which bits we remember and which bits we prefer to forget is the battleground now. We remember bits of our past and do our best to forget others. The great argument in Bristol the other month was how far Bristol should remember that it made its prosperity trading in slaves, or whether it should slide over that bit and pretend it was all about wine. When Ministers talked the other day about the need to have a British national day, I spent an interesting half hour trying to think which national day we should celebrate. Would it be Trafalgar, or Waterloo? I fancy the cutting off of King Charles's head myself, but others might disagree. How about the Bill of Rights in 1689? That is a Protestant festival and Catholics are extremely unhappy about it. Trying to choose a national day immediately makes us partisans of one or other view of British history.
	The noble Lord, Lord Luke, takes, as I was taught it in the 1960s, the "conservative" view of British history—that history is about great men, heroes and villains. The "radical", more popular, progressive view already in the early sixties was that we need to talk about the common stream, the common people, and social and economic change as it affected most of our ancestors, not simply our masters. Linda Colley's narrative is different from the one that Niall Ferguson or Andrew Roberts would give. Roberts is now setting out to write a new history of the English-speaking peoples to demonstrate that Britain has absolutely no connection with those nasty people across the Channel, but is intimately connected with the Canadians, Australians and, above all, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. David Starkey's view of British history is different again from that of the noble Lord, Lord Morgan.
	As for our views on Europe, I have had a professional life dealing with European Union enlargement and we have had arguments with all the potential applicants about how they are the last European state, and the ones behind them are clearly not Europeans. This demonstrates that world history is a battleground. Can we agree on a history of Islam, of Iran, or of China?
	On the point of my noble friend Lord Addington, film gives you the illusion of evidence. I can recall seeing various pictures of the Sino-Japanese war in which the same film was used to illustrate entirely opposite points of view. The illusion of evidence is worsened by factoid history. For reasons you will understand, I find "Braveheart"—immediately adopted as standard history by the Scottish National Party—one of the most appalling mistakes in entirely misrepresenting Scottish history and that of my distant family.
	We need a cross-party consensus, not a Government initiative, let alone one by the curriculum authority. We need an open debate. I am glad that the Royal Society of Arts is planning a series of lectures this autumn, which a number of people will be contributing to on precisely what sort of history we need. We need a commission—or a working party or whatever—with representatives of a range of different views. This is not something the Government can do on their own.
	We need to teach the history of the last century, and of our own last 50 years. That is the most difficult. I heard a senior Conservative MP this morning say to a group of visiting Russians that Britain was lucky not to have experienced problems of post-imperial angst or nostalgia, as Russia had. At which point somebody said, "What about Suez?" What about the defence of the trade routes to India for 25 years after we gave India independence? We need to debate what our national past is, but in order to do that we must recognise how difficult that is. We need a cross-party approach to construct a more inclusive national narrative, which we desperately need, and to place British history in its broader European and global context.